Invasion of the lawyers

Brendan O’Neill says that America’s first gift to Iraq has been the compensation culture and a flood of personal injury claims

Whatever you think about democracy and human rights, the Coalition successfully imported one thing from the West into post-Saddam Iraq — the compensation culture.

Iraq has become a hotbed of legal claims and counterclaims, of individual complaints and class action lawsuits, for everything from physical and mental injury to destruction of property. Iraqis demand compensation for damage caused to their gardens by American tanks, or for the scrapes and dents to their cars caused by run-ins with speeding Humvees. American soldiers have threatened to sue the US military for exposing them to death and injury by terrorist attack, while British soldiers want compensation for injuries sustained in friendly fire incidents. Ambulance-chasing (or perhaps Humvee-chasing) human rights lawyers are everywhere in Iraq, encouraging Iraqis to sue, sue, sue. Where Iraq — following the handover of sovereignty — was supposed to be a showcase for liberation, it has in fact become the latest outpost in the West’s decadent culture of blaming and claiming, where individuals seek to blame somebody or some authority for every misfortune, whether minor or major, that befalls them.

This week Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the government lawyer who resigned from the Foreign Office weeks after the first tanks rolled into Iraq last March, claimed that Coalition troops have been granted immunity from prosecution that is ‘without precedent’; she said that Iraqis who are injured or abused by the Coalition have little legal comeback and are often denied financial restitution. In fact, one reason why the departing Coalition has reportedly done a deal with the new interim government to limit future claims for compensation is precisely because of the burgeoning litigious climate in Iraq, where for the past 16 months demands for compensation, whether formal or informal, have become one of the few means through which Iraqis have been able to challenge the occupying powers.